The Human Brain Projects

The Human Brain Project

Brain Probes: development of new nano, micro, genetic, optical, and electrical technologies making it possible to study an ever broader range of brain structures and functions in greater depth, and more rapidly than is currently possible.

Ethical, legal and social issues: The HBP (The Human Brain Project) will raise important ethical, legal, social, political and philosophical issues both about the research itself and its potential applications. At the same time, its contributions to knowledge of the brain, cognition and behavior will have important philosophical and conceptual implications touching on basic concepts of what makes us human Against this background, the HBP will include a major program of activities dedicated to ethical, legal and social issues. The program will bring together scholars in the brain sciences, social sciences, and the humani ties to study and discuss relevant issues and will use all available channels to en courage open, well-informed debate, to dissipate potential public concerns and to enhance appreciation of the potential benefits of the project’s work.

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Ethical issues involved in hybrid bionicsystems research

“What kind of privacy safeguards are needed if a machine can read your thoughts”?

“Invasive research on humans could involve inhuman or degrading procedures”
“Invasive research on humans could lead to new torture or inhumane punishment techniques”

Will cognition enhancers exacerbate differences between rich and poor? Or, instead, will they relegate social diversity to the status of historical artifact?

What happens if we deduce through neuroimagingthe physiological basis for morality?
Or, and by the way, what happens to free will?” (Scientific American (Editorial), September 2003)

Autonomous behavior of robots: what degree of autonomy should we give to the robot…if uncontrolled robot actions can be dangerous to humans (assistance robotics)
If we wish to deal with cases when the user’s will is “ethically”unacceptable (robots used for military purposes) Are Asimov’s Laws adequate?
Is realistically threatening the possibility of auto-replicating artificial entities?
Ontological status of “cyborgs”and A.I. creatures:
What is machine and what is human?
Who may be re-programmed?
Can we have dissidents in a world of replicants?

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Scientists Warn of Ethical Battle Concerning Military Mind Control

Advances in neuroscience are closer than ever to becoming a reality, but scientists are warning the military – along with their peers – that with great power comes great responsibility

By JASON KOEBLER

A future of brain-controlled tanks, automated attack drones and mind-reading interrogation techniques may arrive sooner than later, but advances in neuroscience that will usher in a new era of combat come with tough ethical implications for both the military and scientists responsible for the technology, according to one of the country’s leading bioethicists.

“Everybody agrees that conflict will be changed as new technologies are coming on,” says Jonathan Moreno, author ofMind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century. “But nobody knows where that technology is going.”

Moreno warns in an essay published in the science journal PLoS Biology Tuesday that the military’s interest in neuroscience advancements “generates a tension in its relationship with science.”

“The goals of national security and the goals of science may conflict. The latter employs rigorous standards of validation in the expansion of knowledge, while the former depends on the most promising deployable solutions for the defense of the nation,” he writes.

Much of neuroscience focuses on returning function to people with traumatic brain injuries, he says. Just as Albert Einstein didn’t know his special theory of relativity could one day be used to create a nuclear weapon, neuroscience researchintended to heal could soon be used to harm.

“Neuroscientists may not consider how their work contributes to warfare,” he adds.

Moreno says there is a fine line between using neuroscience devices to allow an injured person to regain baseline functions and enhancing someone’s body to perform better than their natural body ever could.

“Where one draws that line is not obvious, and how one decides to cross that line is not easy. People will say ‘Why would we want to deny warfighters these advantages?’” he says.

[Mind Control, Biometrics Could Change the World]

Moreno isn’t the only one thinking about this. The Brookings Institution’s Peter Singer writes in his book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, that “‘the Pentagon’s real-world record with things like the aboveground testing of atomic bombs, Agent Orange, and Gulf War syndrome certainly doesn’t inspire the greatest confidence among the first generation of soldiers involved [in brain enhancementresearch.]”

The military, scientists and ethicists are increasingly wondering how neuroscience technology changes the battlefield. The staggering possibilities are further along than many think. There is already development on automated drones that are programmed to make their own decisions about who to kill within the rules of war. Other ideas that are closer-than-you-think to becoming a military reality: Tanks controlled from half a world away, memory erasures that could prevent PTSD, and “brain fingerprinting” that could be used to extract secrets from enemies.Moreno foretold some of these developments when he first published Mind Wars in 2006, but not without trepidation.

“I was afraid I’d be dismissed as a paranoid schizophrenic when I first published the book,” he says. But then a funny thing happened—the Department of Defense and other military groups began holding panels on neurotechnology to determine how and when it should be used. I was surprised how quickly the policy questions moved forward. Questions like: ‘Can we use autonomous attack drones?’ ‘Must there be a human being in the vehicle?’ ‘How much of a payload can it have?’. There are real questions coming up in the international legal community.”

All of those questions will have to be answered sooner than later, Moreno says, along with a host of others. Should soldiers have the right to refuse “experimental” brain implants? Will the military want to use some of this technology before science deems it safe?

“There’s a tremendous tension about this,” he says. “There’s a great feeling of responsibility that we push this stuff out so we’re ahead of our adversaries.

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Hacking the human brain,,,

August 20, 2012  Madison Ruppert, Contributor

As hard as it is to believe, what many might think is the last bastion of total privacy, namely, the human mind, is quickly becoming just as vulnerable as the rest of our lives with the invention of mind-reading devices, brain implants and other ways to “hack” the mind.

Now security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oxford and the University of Geneva, have created a custom program to interface with brain-computer interface (BCI) devices and steal personal information from unsuspecting victims. The researchers targeted consumer-grade BCI devices due to the fact that they are quickly gaining popularity in a wide variety of applications including hands-free computer interfacing, video games and biometric feedback programs.

Furthermore, there are now application marketplaces – similar to the ones popularized by Apple and the Android platform – which rely on an API to collect data from the BCI device. Unfortunately with all new technology comes new risks and until now, “The security risks involved in using consumer-grade BCI devices have never been studied and the impact of malicious software with access to the device is unexplored,” according to a press release.

 

The individuals involved with this project – which resulted in a research paper entitled “On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces,” include Ivan Martinovic and Tomas Ros of the Universities of Oxford and Geneva, respectively, along with Doug Davies, Mario Frank, Daniele Perito, and Dawn Song, all of the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings of these innovative researchers are nothing short of disturbing. They found “that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information.” Indeed, they used relatively cheap BCI devices based on electroencephalography (EEG) in order to demonstrate the feasibility of surprisingly simple and effective attacks. The information that can be gained by the attacks is incredibly sensitive, including, “bank cards, PIN numbers, area of living, the knowledge of the known persons.”

Most troubling is the fact that this represents “the first attempt to study the security implications of consumer-grade BCI devices,” which makes the success of the attacks that much more disconcerting. The researchers tested out their proprietary program on 28 different participants who, while they were obviously aware that they were cooperating in a study, were not aware that they were being “brain-hacked,” as it were. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, the researchers found “that the entropy of the private information is decreased on the average by approximately 15% – 40% compared to random guessing attacks.”

Or as Sebastian Anthony put it in writing for ExtremeTech, “in general the experiments had a 10 to 40% chance of success of obtaining useful information.” The researchers leveraged a distinctive EEG signal pattern known as the P300 response. This brainwave pattern typically occurs when the subject recognizes something such as a friend’s face or a tool necessary to complete a given task. Using the knowledge of the P300 response, the researchers created a program which utilizes a technique which those who are familiar with typical hacking might call a “brute force” method.

However, this method is only loosely comparable to the traditional brute force methods since we’re talking about using a brute force attack on the human mind. The researchers did this by flashing pictures of maps, banks, PINs, etc. while monitoring the subject for any P300 responses. After they had collected enough data from the subject, they were able to easily compare the captured information in order to see when a P300 response was triggered by a certain image.

Thus, this allowed the researchers to discover with surprising accuracy which bank the subject uses, where they live, and other information which could potentially be highly sensitive. The key to capturing this information seems to be making the subject remain unaware of the fact that they are being attacked either through specially formulated “games” designed to steal personal information from the mind of the target or through a false sense of security engendered by social engineering techniques.

Personally, I find it quite troubling that people could have their personal information stolen simply by playing what they think is a normal game controlled by a BCI device when in reality it is a carefully engineered piece of software designed to pull private data from the target’s mind. As Anthony correctly points out, “Moving forward, this brain hack can only improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper, more accurate, and thus more extensively used.”

However, Anthony incorrectly states, “Really, your only defense is to not think about the topic,” when in reality the P300 response can occur without consciously “thinking” about the topic. The response can occur when a picture of a familiar face or location shows up, even if the individual isn’t thinking about the familiar person or the location. While someone could theoretically be on the defensive in an attempt to minimize their responses, the entire methodology of the hacker depends on avoiding detection to begin with.

Therefore, if the target is already consciously on the defensive, the hacker has failed in their task of remaining in the shadows and carrying out the attack without the knowledge of the target. That being said, if programs are created in a clever enough manner, I seriously doubt that most people would be able to tell that they’re being actively attacked in order to obtain their most private and sensitive information.